


The Twenty-Eighth Day

by Maybethings



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon, Character Death, Dreams, Fever Dreams, Gen, Noncanonical Character Death, Qunari
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-29
Updated: 2011-04-29
Packaged: 2017-11-02 03:25:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/364452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maybethings/pseuds/Maybethings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An imagining of what might happen if Sten is left unrecruited, and the Qunari’s last days as Lothering falls to the Blight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Twenty-Eighth Day

It is the twenty-first day Sten has spent in the cage. He may have lost count by now. He has spent his store of foreign words, many lacking the sharp snap and decisive vowels of his tongue. He has counted in binary on his hands, in Qunlat and Common. He has counted in binary on his _toes_.

The floor of the cage is strewn with straw, but it has long since degraded into a thin, musty mat unsuitable for sitting on. His tailbone doesn’t like him any more. And so, the Qunari stands and stands and stares out at the world. Preparing for what must inevitably come, he recites a snatch of a prayer.

“ _Shok ebasit hissra. Meraad astaarit, meraad itwasit, aban aqun. Maraas shokra. Anaam esaam Qun_.”

As he finishes, Sten raises his head—and finds someone staring right back at him. Before him stands a weedy-looking stranger, clad in armour that seems awkward upon his frame. A fighter, then, newly-minted in some way. With him is another man, clad in similar armour, and only vaguely less awkward-looking; beside him, a vaguely familiar woman in the hissra Chantry’s clothing. Rounding out the group is a mage in some of the scantiest, most frivolous garments he has seen yet. He glares at her. So much skin and so little armour. One well-aimed blow with a sword, and he…

…Well, best not talk about swords. His palms still feel hollow and naked, his fingers yearning still for the weapon stripped from them.

“Hello,” says the stranger, snapping him from his reverie. _Vashedan_! The idiot is still staring, like a child seeing a plant or an insect for the first time.

“You aren’t one of my captors,” Sten rumbles out in a voice long made hoarse by battle, hunger and thirst. “I have nothing to say that would amuse your kind. Leave me in peace.” Unsurprisingly, the stranger does no such thing.

“What are you?” he is asked, kindly enough, but it makes him bristle. He is a who, not a what. Well, two can play at that.

“I am a prisoner,” he snaps. “I’m in a cage, am I not? I was placed here by the Chantry.”

“The revered mother said he slaughtered an entire family. Even the children,” the Chantry woman interjects. Ah, he remembers now—she’s the one with the strange, lilting accent. The one who walks around humming songs to herself. Insane. If she travels with them, they are surely doomed.

“It is as she says. I am Sten of the Beresaad—” he checks himself, they cannot understand. “—the vanguard of the Qunari peoples.”

“Qunari?”

“If you haven’t heard of us, that is your own shortcoming.” The incense-tinged air of Seheron, and its salt and its tea, will never reach him again, and he suddenly feels a great hollowness in the core of his body. Or perhaps that’s just his empty belly. “It matters little, now. I will die soon enough. I suggest you leave me to my fate.”

The mage muses about a proud, powerful creature being trapped as Darkspawn fodder—why does it still have its tongue?!—and promptly gets into a mild argument with the other fighter. The conversation is too quick and barbed to process right away. All the while the stranger appears thoughtful, and asks questions of him, one after the other. Well, it would not hurt at this point to answer them. Even if he were to be turned into some illusory parable to scare children into behaving. They could use some behaving.

“Aren’t you interested in seeking atonement?” the stranger asks.

“Death will be my atonement.” He will die, after all, through darkspawn or the sundering of his body from thirst and starvation. 

“There are other ways to redeem yourself,” the stranger says with more conviction than he’s shown yet, and more kindness than Sten has received in twenty days. He explains that he is a Grey Warden, and that he and his companions are questing to end the Blight—the same that brought Sten to these distant shores.

A Grey Warden? This one?! He does not look strong. He does not look particularly old or wise, either. He just looks like a youngster in armour that’s not his. Surprising. Perhaps the legends were just legends, after all. But Sten himself is still a soldier, after all: every hair on his head, every scar on his body. Perhaps fighting alongside them would hasten an honorable death in battle. Anything would be better than this glorified chicken coop.

“I’ll ask the Reverend Mother to free you.” The Warden says this with such conviction Sten feels sorry for him. No words can erase what he has done. One person cannot change the fate of another with simple talk. Can they?

“Thank you,” he says, and realises that he means the words, even aimed at one of the unenlightened.

“I will be back,” the Warden says, and is off with his three companions.

He does not come back. 

It is the twenty-first night, and a long one. Sten has to spend most of it quashing the tiny spark of hope that had leapt within him, and submitting himself once more to fate.

* * *

It is the twenty-second day, bitter and changeless. Sten’s stomach has long since ceased its grumbling. It is beyond grumbling. In the evening it rains, a squall worthy of any in Seheron, and he is drenched to the skin. He does not allow more than a few drops of water to pass his lips; those that do taste of blood and rust.

It is the twenty-fourth day. His hair smells of wet dog. His clothes smell of straw. 

By the twenty-seventh day his vision has started to blur. He hears snatches of gossip as the refugees come and go. Grey Wardens fought werewolves in Dalish forests. Grey Wardens fought the undead in Redcliffe. They are dead. They are alive. They betrayed the king. The Grey Wardens seem to be doing everything short of stopping the Blight. Perhaps it is best that they did not come back for him. Yet Sten finds himself wondering about the motley group and its ill-suited leader. And the determination in that leader’s eyes, and the conviction in his words.

_There are other ways to redeem yourself._

Sten remains standing, but closes his eyes and leans against the bars of his cage. He is going to ache all over when he awakes. If he awakes.

He is just very, very tired.

* * *

_Sten is on a battlefield with his own bright armor weighing heavily upon him. A steely shriek betrays the darkspawn that has risen up behind him, claws raised to puncture his skull. Instinct takes over and he swings, chopping the beast in two._

_He looks to his hands. They grasp Asala tightly, as one lover cleaves to another, and his blade shines bright with blood. His heart soars; he had almost forgotten this wholeness, this sense of completion. It is almost painful in its purity, even as his blood pounds dizzily in his ears. He is not well. He still feels the hunger and thirst of his imprisonment. But his soul is found, back in his hands where it is meant to be; steel lies snug across his shoulders; his foes are falling before him. If it is illusion, it is a very good illusion._

_“Sten!” a voice rings out. “Sten, to me!” It is a voice that seems like many voices layered on top of one another, male and female. And he recognises it, somehow. It is the Grey Warden, bow on his back, sword and shield in his hands, eyes shining bright with concentration. How is it that he knows they are as a group, that all here are comrades, that he and this Warden are inexplicably_ kadan _? Quashing the needless thoughts, Sten runs to his aid, cursing his enemies in thunderous Qunlat as he cuts them down. Their brittle bones crumble and crunch beneath his feet. Somewhere in the distance he hears the mage shout in triumph as a cone of ice erupts through a cluster of genlock, and a familiar male voice yells “For the Grey Wardens!” before blood sprays through the air. The ichor spatters his braids and runs down his face._

_“Why are you here?” Sten asks the Warden as a Hurlock runs toward them. He smashes Asala’s pommel into its rotting nose. The Warden thrusts twin daggers into its ribs. Daggers? Those weren’t there before, surely?_

_“I do my duty,” she says. The voice is unmistakably feminine. Sten’s dizziness reasserts itself. As he looks, the Warden’s face seems to shift and change at every moment. Dwarven rogue. Elven mage. Templar. Berserker. Male. Female. All of this at once._

_“What trickery is this?” he growls at this abomination. The Genlock and Hurlock appear to see nothing out of the ordinary. Is he the one going insane? “Who are you?”_

_“I am a Grey Warden,” the Warden says in that multitudinous voice, looking him in the eyes with undeniable affection. “And you are Sten. As you were, and always will be. Surely the cage does not change who you are?”_

_Another Shriek rises up out of the ground, teeth bared, eyes hungry. The Warden’s blade sings across the creature’s eyes. Sten rams Asala through its chest and it disintegrates, filling his face with black dust._

_The Grey Warden’s laugh rings out triumphantly as the battleground fades away._

* * *

Sten awakes with the taste of death in his mouth, his pupils dark points in the violet of his eyes. The darkspawn have reached Lothering.

The air is filled with flames, smoke and screaming. Imekari cry for their guardians. The guardians cry for the imekari. A handful of templars flail uselessly against the whole abominable horde. Such chaos. Any Qunari settlement would fight, tooth and nail and even more teeth, down to the last drop of blood. A pity they aren’t of the Qun.

A piercing scream splits the air nearby, and a woman’s body flies through the air to thud against his cage. She slumps to the ground, head at a physically impossible angle across her shoulder, blood draining from her ears. A hurlock advances, chuckling to itself. Sten thinks it is chuckling—the noise reminds him of rutting dathrasi. One of the imekari runs up, screaming wordlessly (‘Mothermothermother’) and throws itself down beside the dead woman, wailing. The hurlock’s head jerks to one side, as if in curiosity, but it advances nevertheless, murderous glee kindling in the backs of its dead eyes.

_Surely the cage does not change who you are?_  The Warden’s aggravating words echo in his mind. Funny how something so soft can be such a sharp goad. The hurlock is no coward to Sten. Any antaam might cut down the weak before him. But it is one thing to fight a foe that will not retaliate, and quite another to fight a foe that cannot retaliate. The choice seems clear.

_Struggle is an illusion_ , something whispers within him.

No cage in Lothering can really hold a Qunari. Not even a starved one that smells of straw and smoke and wet dog, once he has turned his back on surrender. Bracing himself, Sten wrenches one bar free from its moorings with a sickening groan of tortured metal, and pounds it into the lock on his cage, over and over. The effort sets stars in front of his eyes momentarily, and even the long, ugly bar feels like stone in his hands. But he shifts it, and suddenly it feels good enough to fight with. He brings it down again. The bolts break. The door swings open. He is weak. But he will be strong enough for this last fight.

Sten roars a long and ringing battle cry. The boy turns. More importantly, the hurlock turns, and shambles toward the Qunari instead. He will turn what remains of his life into redemption. Even in the service of blithering, weak simpletons.

_The tide rises, the tide falls._

With a mighty sweep, Sten crashes the bar into the hurlock’s skull. As it staggers he tears the monster’s weapon from its hands and lops its head off with it. He looks up to find several more pairs of beady eyes staring at him with bloodlust—genlock and hurlock and a Shriek that seems bent on avenging the insult to its dreamkin. He’s not worried. Not now. Now he’s just trying to survive a little longer.

“Come at me,” he yells, giving tongue in his native language. How triumphant he sounds, now he is in his element. “I am Sten of the Beresaad! Now face your opponent!”

The horde rushes him, and he embraces them with the solemnity befitting any of his rank and kind. The plundered greatsword sings through bones and rotting flesh, air and poisoned magic. His blood sings against his dizziness even as it flows across his skin. Hunger weighs him down more than any armour. And as the darkspawn surge at him, pull the weapon from his once-strong fingers and swing at his throat, the words of his prayer thunder unbidden in his ears.

_The sea does not change. There is no struggle._

* * *

It is the twenty-eighth day. Morning finds Sten lying torn amongst the corpses of Lothering, finally free of his many cages. His eyes stare, defiant and unseeing, at the bruise-coloured sky far away from home. Yet his face is somehow utterly at peace. He fell in battle, as he was made. It was not a death to be ashamed of.

_Victory is in the Qun._


End file.
